The dielectric constant or dielectric loss of a dielectric, and the magnetic constant or magnetic loss of a magnetic substance make up an extremely important characteristic of a variety of electrically insulated materials or magnetic materials, respectively. First, respecting the dielectric characteristics, since the dielectric loss can also be applied to high-frequency heating process, these important characteristics are critically measured in conjunction with a wide variety of materials for application to electric industries and communication technologies. Furthermore, those who are concerned in the academic field measure anisotropy of the dielectric constant of crystals.
Conventionally, either audio frequencies or high frequencies are widely made available for measurement of electrical properties of those materials mentioned above either by making up a capacitor using specimen made from metal-evaporated electrodes, or by filing up a cavity resonator with specimen materials, or by adhering specimen onto walls of the cavity resonator.
However, even those conventional materials made from either sheets or fibers not intended for electrical applications have their own anisotropy related to dielectric constant, dielectric loss, or dielectric tangent, which can usefully be made available for the index for checking to see constancy and process compatibility of those materials. For example, any variation of the quality and blended amount of pigment, filler agent, and other additives mixed into plastic material appears as the varied dielectric constant and loss. Likewise, even the slightest variation of the elongation of plastic material appears as the anisotropy of the dielectric constant and loss. Reflecting this, if either dielectric constant, dielectric loss, or dielectric tangent, or the anisotropy of these can easily be measured in the production site, these values can effectively be used for the index in following up quality control of products.
On the other hand, not only sheet-like or web-like materials, but there are a variety of functional materials widely being used, whose sections are in the shape of either rectangular, circular, or thin and lengthy like yarns. Although any conventional system can measure the dielectric constant and others of materials having two-dimensional expansion in the configuration, as mentioned above, such a conventional system cannot measure dielectric requirements of specimens like substantially thick material, linear specimen, twines, or the like. In particular, these is no practical system that allows the test operator to easily and quickly implement measurement of the dielectric requirements in factories against extremely thin materials.
Next, respecting the magnetic materials, conventionally, magnetic tapes and disks are manufactured by coating blends of ferrite fine powder and binder agent on a plastic sheet. However, since fine powder of ferrite is made from needle-like crystals, some of these crystals are likely to be oriented in specific directions when being coated onto a plastic substrate in accordance with viscosity of the binder agent itself. Although the orientation of these ferrite powders could affect the eventual performance characteristic of magnetic tapes or disks, since there was no means for actually measuring the orientation degree in factories, neither research nor control has positively been followed up over the orientation characteristic of fine powders of ferrite. Recently, to implement high-density recording of data signals on a magnetic tape or disk, a system has been introduced for applying magnetic field onto the tape surface in the vertical direction. When applying this process, desirably, needle crystals of fine powder of ferrite should vertically be oriented to the tape surface. Although this can be realized by vertically applying magnetic field onto the plastic surface before the coated layer of ferrite dries and hardens itself, actually, no means has ever been made available for easily and quickly checking and confirming the realized orientation of coated layer of ferrite materials.